The present invention relates to a venus catheter device. In particular it relates to a single catheter device which may be used either to infuse multiple fluids through multiple lumens, or, alternatively, to use multiple lumens and infuse through some or all of them simultaneously.
Conventional venus catheter devices use either a single lumen or multiple lumens. Those which were known heretofore which had multiple lumens had a corresponding number of inlet ports to the lumens, i.e. three inlet ports for three lumens. Such catheters are used in medical applications to introduce or extract fluids from a patient. In particular, multiple lumen catheters are designed to take advantage of having several different lumens within a single catheter body. Multiple, separate lumens in one catheter reduce the number of separate catheters requiring separate puncture sights to the patient. In addition, multi-lumen catheters offer isolated lumens for fiber optic and electronic units. A disadvantage of multiple lumen catheters of the type heretofore known is that each lumen must be reduced in size, and, therefore, flow rate, in order to have multiple lumens fit within a single external diameter. Accordingly, current designs for multi-lumen catheters sacrificed flow rate for the multiple lumens.